Why has the governor of New York been treating Staten Islanders with disdain over toll relief? Doesn’t Andrew Cuomo care about keeping his promises?

For nearly a year, Mr. Cuomo and members of our state delegation in Albany have repeatedly vowed that a new discount is on the verge of being provided to Island drivers on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Yet there has been no end to this political tie-up.

We have a right to expect better in the only borough of New York City to be landlocked by expensive tolls.

Mr. Cuomo is up for re-election in 2014.

So are the six Islanders in the Legislature, lawmakers whose influence has yet to pay off at the Verrazano for Island residents and businesses.

Toll relief has turned into a campaign issue. “Be patient,” Islanders have been told month after month — while our wallets are being depleted by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a toll-happy mega-spendthrift that treats the bridge like an ATM machine to obtain revenue.

As he campaigns for a second four-year term, Mr. Cuomo has been touting his success in turning a $10 billion deficit in New York State into a $2 billion surplus.

Supposedly, there was a deal in place for Albany to give $14 million a year to the MTA to offset an E-ZPass discount for Staten Islanders on the Verrazano.

The plan was to reduce the V-N toll by 76 cents for Island residents to a level of $5.50. The toll for businesses based in the borough was to have been cut by half.

With the governor’s OK, both chambers of the Legislature were said to be on board. The Assembly actually passed the measure. But it wasn’t part of the state budget approved on March 31.

For reasons that remain unclear, the shell game is still going on. Which is deplorable.

There were predictions that the discount would be approved before the end of the legislative session in June.

But that didn’t happen.

“I’m confident we will fashion a solution,” said Mr. Cuomo in September during a visit to Staten Island.

To our faces, he called toll relief a “priority.”

Some priority.

The governor, who was visiting Mount Loretto at the time, did note quite fairly that his administration had “come up with alternative solutions for Staten Island before” on tolls. He was referring to the deal with the Port Authority to broaden discounts at the three bridges to New Jersey — the Goethals, Outerbridge and Bayonne.

But Mr. Cuomo warned that trying to deliver toll relief at the Verrazano was “complicated” and “expensive.”

Expensive? In an annual state budget of more than $130 billion, what’s needed is a sum of $14 million.